What are the procurement procedures (in simple terms)

Imagine that you need to choose a supplier to provide equipment for the pipeline. You know exactly what equipment you need. You can not mention the manufacturer in the TZ, but you can name the technical specifications. Then you describe all the desired parameters of the equipment, delivery times and other conditions, calculate the initial price (usually the average market price in the current year or the price of the last year adjusted for inflation) and announce the bidding.

And here you need to determine the supplier selection scheme.

The simplest is to request quotes . Each of the participants in the closed mode offers a price, and then the organizer reviews and evaluates quotation requests for their compliance. Who has the application meets all requirements, and the price is minimal, he delivers.

This procedure does not take into account anything except the price and the fact of compliance with the requirements of the notice. Neither the requirements for equipment for installation work (if there are works), nor experience of similar works, nor the availability of specialists — nothing of the kind can be left to the customer. This leads to significant risks: they can bring affordable cheap goods, but of poor quality.

And what to do to protect yourself from low-quality products, albeit at a cheap price?

You can resort to two options: complicate the terms of reference or choose a different method of procurement.

5 types of procedures

Procurement procedures are competitive and non-competitive. Noncompetitive is purchases from a single supplier. For example, only one company in Russia produces nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants. If there are more suppliers and the market is developed (for example, the dairy products market), then manufacturing companies in the market are seriously competing (my colleague told about this in the past material ). In such competitive markets it is advantageous to conduct competitive procedures.

Competitive procedures in 44-ФЗ include an auction, a tender, a request for proposals, a request for quotations.

You already know about the request for quotations : this is a simplified selection of suppliers by price proposals for one round.

An auction is such a procedure in several rounds, where the bidding process is openly visible, and after each bid, any of the participants may reduce the bid. When participants stop doing this (usually there is a minimum step and the time from the last bid to the end of the procedure), the auction is considered to be won back, the contract goes to the person who called the minimum price.

The competition is held when the customer is interested, in addition to saving money, the quality of the purchased goods, works, services. Based on the tender documentation, the customer assesses the suppliers in several stages. At the first stage, the conformity of the product itself to the requirements of the documentation is assessed. Great attention is paid to the quality of the supplied goods, works or services and the guarantees that the supplier gives on this account. At the second stage, the supplier is assessed: its reliability and qualification. At the third stage there is a competition at the price. The supplier needs to seriously try to find the best balance between the price of its offer, the wishes of the customer, as well as take responsibility for guaranteeing the quality of the contract for several months or even years.

There are contests with limited participation, where you must meet some criteria at the entrance. For example, when it is necessary to reconstruct a museum - an object of cultural heritage. The limitation here is the fact of the presence or absence of a license for construction work on objects protected by the Ministry of Culture of Russia or UNESCO.

Request for proposals is a procedure that is slightly simpler than the competition, but more complicated than a request for quotations. This method is used infrequently, for example, if, after conducting a tender and an auction, the customer could not find a supplier. The winner is selected both by criteria and by price, but considerable attention is paid to the conditions of performance of the contract.

Correctly register the criteria for a competition or request for proposals - a separate art that requires knowledge in the subject area and the foundations of economics. Therefore, when the purchase is simple, we need a simple procedure. Auctions are simpler and faster at times than contests: less documentation, faster launch. For example, the task is to purchase products for kindergarten. One thousand cans of baby food are needed, I announce the auction at such and that time maximum for such price. For such a procedure, it is easy to find a supplier - a reseller or a manufacturer - who benefits from quickly selling a large batch of products.

What is the result?

Auctions are considered the “gold standard of procurement”: they are fast and simple, on the one hand, and provide real competition with a clear result and steps between suppliers - on the other. But in fact it is not always perfect, because setting only prices as a criterion is a “scourge” of public procurement: quality sometimes suffers. A benchmark only on the price forces officials to buy cheap products, but at the same time they report on a high level of savings, thereby allegedly increasing their own efficiency.

We know cases when, for example, there is a purchase of butter. The supplier wins with a price lower than that offered by local manufacturers. They say: this is lower than the cost, that is, instead of oil, the spread will be supplied. And in the TK - it is oil. Then he will put this spread, and the customer must decide whether to accept it or not, because it will be necessary to start long trials and, possibly, to launch a new procedure. And the company will stand at all without oil all this time. Or here's an example: somehow the concrete of the wrong brand was poured into the launching pad for launching rockets (unverified information, but it looks like it). Now, of course, for such a severely punished, but earlier the legislative framework was more gentle to violators.

Or there was a case when the customer wrote an obsolete Soviet GOST on the tram rails for three years by mistake, no one came to him from suppliers, the procedure was broken for three years in a row. But he ignored the advice and continued to write in the TK requirements for the rails according to the old GOST. You can’t blame the customer here, because not every year rails are bought. But the fact remains: it is necessary to study the subject area.

Actually, it is on this fragile balance between openness (anyone who meets the requirements can come), legal requirements to procedures and TK (objectivity, completeness and literacy), the price and convenience of the procedure itself keeps the system of public procurement. Since the beginning of this year, thanks to the almost complete transfer of purchases to the electronic form, the speed and efficiency of the procurement should be expected to increase.

Here there are more details about how it all works:

• Ecosystem of the digital procurement world (to steal less).
• Electronic signature for participation in procurement.
• What are the purchases, and how it looks from the point of view of IT.
• Attack model: where they are mostly abused on competitive purchases and how they fight it.